Have you seen Frank McSherry's COST paper? (and follow ups) http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/15/COST.html http://www.frankmcsherry.or

Have you seen Frank McSherry's COST paper? (and follow ups) http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/15/COST.html http://www.frankmcsherry.org/graph/scalability/cost/2015/01/... Really fun reading on exactly this issue - definitely changed my view on Spark and compute clusters. People definitely don't realise just how powerful a modern computer is, and how far you can get on a single one.